The rich scholarship on Rousseau can be roughly divided into four camps: (1) philosophical work based on exegesis (a broad category with a strong Straussian subgroup); (2) analytical studies, mostly of The Social Contract and the Second Discourse; (3) psychological work on Jean-Jacques, with an emphasis on his autobiographical writings; and (4) literary studies on the rhetorical dimension of his work. Literary studies have been mostly neglected by political theorists and philosophers. Yet they start with an important insight ignored by philosophers and theorists: the man, the author, and the multiple authorial and narrative personae in Rousseau’s texts are not the same person. In his remarkable new book, Rousseau’s Reader, John T. Scott imports this idea into the field of political theory to shine new light on Rousseau’s political thought.

This approach is justified, Scott argues, because of Rousseau’s singular and relentless striving to respond to one problem: how to convince his readers of fundamental truths about human nature and society that are completely contradictory to what they believe. For such a radical project, Rousseau is well aware that rational demonstration will not suffice. Senses and emotions must be mobilized. The Genevan must therefore be able to persuade, rather than convince, his readers to convert them to the idea of “the natural goodness of man.” Armed with powerful rhetorical tools he must create a seductive polyphony that will touch his audience at different levels of their reason and sensibility.

As Scott argues, Plato’s Phaedrus provides the philosophical formulation of the problem Rousseau faces. Socrates claimed that the written text was not an adequate medium for the process of conversion to the truth: dialectic cannot be present in a written text that has no way of responding to questions and adapting to different audiences. This challenge, alluded to in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, is acute for Rousseau, who wants to convert both the few and the many, who are likely to be seduced by appearances, to believe in a truth that is hard to grasp in a corrupt world.

If we consider Rousseau to be taking up this formidable challenge, Scott argues, we should view the entirety of his work as imagining an innovative set of devices meant to educate readers, explicitly or implicitly, in order to convert them to his system. For this purpose, Rousseau invents multiple authorial figures and takes readers on a journey through riddles, paratextual apparatuses, embedded texts, engravings, overflowing footnotes, and other narrative devices. Rousseau scholarship touches on this set of elaborate strategies only in passing yet does not analyze them as a whole in relation to his philosophy. This is what Scott proposes to remedy in Rousseau’s Reader.

The introduction of the book offers an interpretive method based on the “author–reader” dialogue, inspired by late twentieth-century trends in literary criticism such as Wolfgang Iser’s “reader-response theory.” Following this approach, seven chapters propose close readings of four major texts—the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, The Social Contract, and of course Emile, whose analysis takes up four chapters (about half the book). A conclusion briefly suggests how this interpretive method could be extended to other texts and authors.

The first chapter of the book makes an excellent case for Scott’s thesis that Rousseau aimed to educate his readers, while taking up the Phaedrus’s challenge. Scott shows how Rousseau embeds the oral version of the discourse to the Academy of Dijon into a complex paratext in the written Discourse. This technique creates paths for different sets of readers (enlightened and common men) to access the double argument he is making there. In turn, the chapters on Emile do an excellent job unfolding the virtuosity of Rousseau’s imagined games between the different authorial personae of the book and the implied readers. Scott’s use of the author–reader relation allows us to make sense of puzzling aspects of Rousseau’s writing, such as the reason why the notes of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, are, quite extravagantly, about one-third of its length.

The strength of Rousseau’s Reader is that it methodically takes us through these major texts in excavating the significance of the devices created by the author–reader dialogue—games, multiplication of authors, de-doubling of characters, and so on. It explores the margins and the “frame” of Rousseau’s texts, focusing on title pages, frontispieces, prefaces, footnotes, and embedded texts (i.e., texts within texts such as the famous “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”). This meticulous interpretive work offers original comparisons between different textual versions, published and unpublished (such as the Geneva Manuscript and The Social Contract, or between the oral and now lost version of the First Discourse and the published one). Instead of focusing exclusively on the argumentative content of Rousseau’s texts, Scott is interested in showing what the text does to readers. In turn, he sketches what imagined readers do to transform the content of the text in the act of interpretation that reading Rousseau requires of them.

Surely, arguing that Rousseau’s project is pedagogical in nature is not original in itself, as Scott acknowledges. Nor is the claim that he is a skilled rhetorician or a champion of polyvocal personifications—a claim that has already been made on the more literary side of Rousseau scholarship from Starobinski to Derrida and de Man (all authors that Scott refers to). The originality of the book lies elsewhere—in its impressive work bridging disciplines and methodologies and demonstrating how techniques traditionally used in literature can teach political theorists new modes of reading theoretical texts.

One may wish that the author had developed further the paradoxical position of Rousseau vis-à-vis rhetoric and its relation to truth and power. Although Rousseau invites us to believe in his veracity—after all he holds the motto vitam impendere vero—there is an obvious contradiction in the position, held in several of his works, that rhetoric is dangerous, deceptive, and ought to be restricted and the fact that he reserves for himself an extensive use of it. There is another contradiction in his stance that rhetoric ought to be simple and unmediated, and his use of complex narrative devices and puzzling engravings that do not have a purely illustrative purpose. The book also does not elaborate on the tension between “education” and “persuasion,” which are not recognized as the problematic conceptual pairing that, in my view, they are. Because the book focuses primarily on the mechanics of the author–reader dialogue—on the “how” rather than the “why”—it mentions but does not dwell on the metatheoretical problems of the use of rhetoric itself.

Rousseau’s Reader is not an introduction to Rousseau’s philosophy: its detailed and subtle interpretations demand readers already familiar with his texts. Instead, it is a major scholarly book that proposes a wide range of original analyses on issues that have too often been neglected. There is little to criticize in the impeccable research proposed here. It is sure to become a lasting reference in Rousseau’s scholarship.